Until such time as accumulated data may otherwise indicate, and to prevent a beautifully effective area of processing being messed up by inept use on pcs, the following policies are in force for all uses of the Clay Table:

Just to remind you, other auditing is not possible in the presence of Present Time Problems and Overts. No auditing is possible in the presence of an ARC Break.

Clay Table work is Level III. This means that it can be used by any HCA/HPA. Any student in training for HCA/HPA in an Academy may use, by general policy, HCA/HPA processes in the Academy while undergoing training. It can be used on any HQS student by an HCA/HPA student. It cannot be used by or taught to HQS students.

These are data like "Acknowledge the pc", "An auditor is one who listens" etc. These belong in the ABCs of Scientology.

Only the student who has completed his HCA training may use it on outside pcs or in an HGC.

No Clay Table work of any kind may be used in PE work or in HAS Co-audits or in public co-audits of any kind where the co-auditors are not already trained in an Academy on Clay Table work.

When a pc has a PTP and you don’t handle it, you get no gain. There will be no rise on a personality test graph. There will be little if any TA action. There will be no gain in the session. The pc will not make his session goals. Etc. Etc. So you don’t audit pcs who have PTPs on anything but the PTPs the pc has.

By recent policy relaxing pc gradation, pcs at any level may be run on Clay Table but only by a Level III (HCA/HPA) trained auditor or in an Academy by someone being trained in Level III processes.

And you don’t audit PTPs slowly and forever. There are numerous ways of handling PTPs. One of them is "What communication have you left incomplete about that problem?" A few answers and poof! no PTP. Another is "What doesn’t (that person or thing pc is having PTP with) know about you?" Other versions of overts and withholds can be used. These are all fast PTP handling methods and they get rid of the PTP and you can audit what you started to audit.

Clay Table work looks simple, works fast. But it is essentially a listing type process where things are being selected to run and that makes it solidly Level III.

The mark of a ruddy amateur in auditing is somebody who can always do successful assists but can’t do a real session. The secret is: in an assist you are handling the PTP, aren’t you? So you never audit over the top of (in the presence of) a PTP!

Expert handling of the auditing Comm Cycle and other fine points are vital to working with a pc on a Clay Table. One has to understand the theory of clearing as given in the Saint Hill tape lecture of 3 Sept ‘64.

Another circumstance is "can’t get down to real auditing because the pc always has so many PTPs". This is only a confession that one can’t handle a PTP and then get on with the session. One fumbles with the PTPs so badly as an auditor one never really handles the pc’s PTPs so of course one never gets on with the job at hand – auditing the pc.

Clay Table evolves Homo Sapiens into Homo Novis, the new man. Clearing in its earliest, original sense, is easily obtained by Clay Table work in the hands of the auditor trained at Level III.

The pro, in a real session, just handles the PTPs quickly, gets the pc into session and gets on with whatever should be run.

That is a marvelous thing. There is no reason to wreck it in pcs and spoil it for them by letting it be badly used by untrained persons.

Clay Table training will be available in Academies across the world. R6 auditors leaving Saint Hill and heading for key points in international central organizations have been carefully trained on Clay Table work and even as this is being written, it is being set up for teaching in most Academies. There is therefore no excuse to use it incorrectly.

Overts are the other principal source of getting no gain.

Clay Table work handles:

Here we really can tell the goony birds from the eagles professionally.

1. The longstanding goal of getting clear, without exceptions or only minor percentages making it – with it comes broad, general clearing. It may have been overdue for a while, but it is here: clearing for anybody;

No pro would think of auditing a pc on other processes in the presence of overts.

2. Improvement of work accomplishment by staffs;

1. The Pro would recognize by the pc’s natter, or lack of previous gain, that the pc had overts;

3. Rapid, certain gains in HGCs as a routine activity by HCA/HPAs;

2. The Pro would know that if he tried to do something else besides pull these overts, the pc would eventually get critical of the auditor; and

4. A penetration of the world of healing and a definite change in our attitude toward healing;

3. The Pro wouldn’t (a) fail to pull the real overts or (b) ARC Break the pc in getting the overts off.

5. More rapid progress through upper courses.

If one gets "reasonable" about the pc’s condition and starts agreeing with the motivators ("look at all the bad things they did to me"), thus ignoring the overts, that’s the end of gains for that pc with that auditor.

There are other gains attainable in Clay Table work. But the above five are the ones you will soon get the full benefit of technically and organizationally.

If one is clumsy in recognizing overts, if one fails to get the pc to give them up, if one fails to properly acknowledge the overt when given, or if one demands overts that aren’t there, overt pulling becomes a howling mess.

The only things which can inhibit these gains are:

Because, then, getting the pc overts off is a tricky business auditors sometimes become shy of doing it. And fail as auditors.

(a) Trying to use Clay Table work without complete briefing;

Sometimes pcs who have big overts become highly critical of the auditor and get in a lot of snide comments about the auditor. If the overt causing it is not pulled the pc will get no gains and may even get ARC broken. If the auditor doesn’t realize that such natter always indicates a real overt, when pcs do it, eventually over the years it makes an auditor shy of auditing.

(b) Use of it by auditors below Level III.

Auditors buy "critical thoughts" the pc "has had" as real overts, whereas a critical thought is a symptom of an overt, not the overt itself. Under these critical thoughts a real overt lies undetected.

I sought for a long while for the technology up to Level IV. We have now achieved it. Let’s go at it right, get it correctly applied, and succeed with it.

Also, I love these pcs who "have to get off a withhold about you. Last night Jim said you were awful……" An experienced auditor closes the right eye slightly, cocks his head a bit to the left and says, "What have you been doing to me I haven’t known about?" "I thought…. " begins the pc. "The question is", says the old pro, "What have you been doing to me that I don’t know about. The word is doing. " And off comes the overt like "I’ve been getting audited by Bessy Squirrel between sessions in the Coffee Shop. "

Well, some auditors are so "reasonable" they never really learn the mechanism and go on getting criticized and getting no gains on pcs and all that. I once heard an auditor say "Of course he was critical of me. What he said was true. I’d been doing a terrible job. " The moral of this story is contained in the fact that this auditor’s pc died. A rare thing but a true one. The pc had terrible overts on Scientology and the auditor, yet this auditor was so "reasonable" those overts were never cleaned up. And that was the end of those auditing sessions.

It’s almost never that drastic, but if an auditor won’t pull overts, well auditing gets pretty unpleasant and pretty pointless too.

A lack of grasp of the overt-motivator sequence (when somebody has committed an overt, he or she has to claim the existence of motivators – the Ded-Dedex version of Dianetics – or simply when one has a motivator he is liable to hang himself by committing an overt) puts an auditor at a very bad disadvantage. Howling pcs and no pc wins.

You can’t audit an ARC Break. In fact you must never audit in the presence of one. Auditing below Level III, the best thing to do is find an auditor who can do ARC Break Assessments.

At Level III and above, do an ARC Break Assessment on the pc. An ARC Break Assessment consists of reading an ARC Break list appropriate to the activity to the pc on a meter and doing nothing but locate and then indicate the charges found by telling the pc what registered on the needle.

That isn’t auditing because it doesn’t use the auditing comm cycle. You don’t ack what the pc says, you don’t ask the pc what it is. You don’t comm. You assess the list between you and the meter, same as no pc there. Then you find what reads and you tell the pc. And that’s all.

A by-passed charge assessment is auditing because you clean every tick of the needle on the list being assessed. The pc is acked, the pc is permitted to Itsa and give his opinions. But you never do a by-passed charge assessment on an ARC Broken pc. You do an ARC Break Assessment as per the paragraph above this one.

These two different activities unfortunately have the word "assessment" in common and they use the same list. Therefore some students confuse them. To do so is sudden death.

You can really clobber a pc by doing a by-passed charge assessment on an ARC Broken pc. And also you can ARC Break a pc by doing an ARC Break Assessment on a pc who isn’t (or has ceased to be) ARC Broken.

So unless you have these two separate and different actions – the ARC Break Assessment and the by-passed charge assessment – clearly understood and can do both of them well and never get too rattled to know which one to use, you can get into plenty of trouble as an auditor.

Only auditing over the top of an ARC Break can reduce a graph, hang the pc up in sessions or worsen his case. So it’s the next to the most serious blunder that an auditor can make. (The most serious error is to deny assistance either by not trying to get the pc into session or not using Scientology at all.)

Auditing an ARC Broken pc and never realizing it can lead to very serious trouble for the auditor and will worsen the pc’s case – the only thing that will.

It is elementary auditing knowledge that no gains occur in the presence of PTPs or overts and that cases worsen when audited over the top of an ARC Break.

There aren’t "lots more conditions that can exist". Given an auditing session there are only these three barriers to auditing.

When you do Clay Table auditing or any other kind of auditing the rules all still apply. A change of process or routine doesn’t change the rules.

In doing Clay Table auditing off a meter one still handles the elements of a session. One puts the pc on the meter to start off and checks for PTPs, overts, withholds, even ARC Breaks, handles them quickly and then goes into the body of the session. Much the same as the oldest model session rudiments. One doesn’t use Mid Ruds or buttons to get started. One just knows the things that mustn’t be there (PTPs, overts, ARC Breaks) and checks for them, handles if found and goes on with the main session activity. If a PTP or an overt or an ARC Break shows up one handles them, putting the pc back on the meter if necessary. When they are handled, the pc is put back into the main activity of the session.

It’s true of any auditing that gets done. It isn’t likely to alter and actually no new data is likely to be found that controverts any of this. The phenomena will still be the same phenomena as long as there are pcs. Ways of handling may change but not these basic principles.

They’re with the auditor in every session ever to be run. So one might as well stay alert to them and be continuously expert in handling them.

They are the only big reefs on which an auditing session can go up high and dry, so their existence, causes and cures are of the greatest possible importance to the skilled auditor.